Plague, poison, steal, and pry.

[Burzuk]

A little more information on these changes:

Plague: Plague now does no damage at all. Instead, it saps the following stats from the victim: int, wis, con, hp, mana, and mv. This is done by applying a negative modifer to the maximum allowed for each of these stats. For example, while plagued, your max hp would be lowered from your healthy max hp, and this amount increases as the disease is allowed to incubate. It also spreads more easily to groupmates now, so be sure to get it cured quickly if you're traveling in a party. Plague won't actually kill the victim, but rather makes him easier to kill and somewhat slower to regenerate (due to decreased stats), as well as make him more vulnerable to any affect has a check against the affected stats. There aren't many now, but more will be added in the future.

Poison: Poison now does a medium amount of initial damage, as well as a large reduction in the victim's strength and dex. Unlike plague, the stat modifiers decrease over time until it is reduced to 0, and the duration is short (so it's quite possible to "run out" the poison without curing it). Poison is best used to temporarily cripple the enemy in combat.

The main difference between the two is that plague is a long-term debilitator, while poison is designed to have an immediate (but short-lived) impact on the victim's fighting abilities (and possibly swing the pendulum during a fight). This makes poison more in-line with the stealth classes (such as thieves and ninjas) that use them to gain a momentary advantage in combat.

The changes to steal and pry are mostly to deter repeated offensive use of steal/pry in combat. Essentially if you're standing in the open (i.e. outside of the city or somewhere where a thief can hide), a thief is forced to actually attempt to blackjack you to use his thief skills, rather than spamming steal/pry as a cheap way of initiating combat. Thief skills are supposed to be used against the unwary and not in a "spam until you succeed" way, and I'm still not 100% happy with them so expect more tweaks down the line.

It's no concidence that these changes are being introduced together. Notice that you can no longer rely on poison to keep you "awake" from blackjacks (due to loss of the per-tick damage), but in return thieves are now more reliant upon using blackjack as well. For the time being you can still use hunger/thirst to keep yourselves awake, however.

These changes represent some minor housekeeping before our next serious batch of changes is ready to be implemented. As I've already disclosed in other forum posts, the next change module will be:

a) combat-oriented;
b) make race selection more unique/interesting; and
c) include goodies for warriors.

This is just the tip of the iceburg though--there are many inter-related issues involved with the next module, and because of the comparably large number of changes involved we will be releasing the package in several installments. It will be much more involved than the last change module (which was transportation spells).

If you have any questions, comments, or complaints about the plague, poison, steal, and pry changes (or if you're bored and want to speculate about what's coming up next), you can use this thread to launch the discussion.

[GodOfWar]

Good changes. Not sure how I feel about plague not doing any damage. Irl, especially back in the day, catching the plague would have killed you, hence the damage aspect, so in a realism sense I'm not too happy about losing the damage, but the rest of the change package is definately more realistic, and thats just damn cool . The poison change was waaay overdue. It's gonna make all them little thiefies and ninjas a little less gimped. And ninjas really need help with the gimpage.

Changing steal and pry is such a good thing. How could you really pry someone's boots off when they're awake anyway? And in response to Divsky's post which should have been in HERE and not the other thread, thieves ARE blackjack machines...where u been this whole time?

I think the next change is gonna be for the mighty warrior gnome!

Your hide in shadows has succeeded!
<30hp 10m 30mv>

[Burzuk]

Re: plague realism, it's actually not very hard to justify. For example, professional adventurers (which all characters are) should easily have the fortitude to not be completely killed off by common diseases, due to fortification from exposure. After all, they're many times hardier than, say, your average insular farmer in Clover with no resistance whatsoever.

Failing that, we can always give people mandatory chicken pox shots when they leave mud school.

Another option is to introduce lethal STD's that kill your character and prevent them from being resurrected at the temple as well (i.e. perm death). Should make the brothel areas more interesting.

[GodOfWar]

[Addreodyn]

Strick the bartender bursts into tears.

[Burzuk]

From DivSky's post elsewhere:

[Louis]

1) poison cannot be used vs blackjack and strangle, but now it can't be used against a necro's sleep neither.

2) i don't think hunger/thirst wakes you from blackjack/strangle/sleep, or at least i heard it didn't. if so, i'd use milk to make myself instantly thirsty before a fight. however, if its not true, then there is no way i can think of to wake myself up against a blackjack/strangle/sleep except attacking a mob and having it track me a few rooms away, trying to surprise the attacker.

[Addreodyn]

Hunger and thirst cause damage. Any amount of damage wakes you. Guess we have to drink milk or blood to avoid sleep/blackjack/strangle instead of herbal brews.

[Itiggidy]

funny, I'd already come up with that as an alternative, since they already screwed with the way milk works.

[Davairus]

Hunger wakes you from healthy sleep, but not the blackjack/sleep/etc kind. So no, you can't do that.

[Hamp]

Will the affects of the new plague still do more to avains due to the vuln?

[Mendek]

Probably harder for them to resist it.

[GodOfWar]

That and it would probably hit em a bit faster.

[Seryie]

Actually, hunger and thirst hasnt woken you up from blackjack / sleep for a long time.....

[Burzuk]

[Kalist19]

The hunger/thirst change actually happened when Resatimm or Ritase was about. About the same time the demon armorer was given fast_attack and bash and dirt kick and hellstream.

[Louis]

hm brainstorming for ways to avoid blackj/strangle/sleep in loss of poison.

* stand in a roomprogged room that damages you for standing there (not practical)

* have a mob track you a few rooms down (kinda practical, though can't be used everywhere, and you'd have to set the trap)

* try to guard against it by using enlarge or finding magical items for enlarging yourself (don't know if there are any items, though an illusionist should probably use it)

so there aren't any good guards against it but now these three skills/spells will always be used how they were intended, unless one of us figure out another devious way to guard against them.

avians are more vuln to plague (which is disease), but are they more vuln to poison as well? if so.. if you are a thief, envenom your plague damage weapon, switch to it after the double backstab, and go to town on an avian. nasty.

the steal and pry changes seem to be made to stop a particular way of playing a thief. probably because the success rate of blackjack is so high, that you should be blackj'ing anyway given the massive bonus to pry, steal, and backstab. a calculating stealth class should be played like one, i suppose. hm, i want a thief.

does dysentery affect regen like poison or plague did? shaman have all 3, don't they? and enfeeblement, and insomnia, and energy drain...

[divsky]

To Louis: Envenom can only be done on slashing and peircing weapons. Plague damage doesn't count as either of those, so a plague/sickness weapon cannot be envenomed. I tried it just a little bit ago.

I still don't understand or like the changes to the thieves. I've always thought they relied way too much on blackjack and I've never liked that every single thief does nothing but goes around blackjacking people. That, and I always thought the RP of a thief who would pickpocket you while talking to you was great. There have been plenty of times I've been having a casual conversation with someone at north square.

You say 'Blah blah blah'

They say 'Blah blah blah'

Bingo! You got 9000 gold!

You say 'Blah blah blah'

Pulling this off, and especially prying from someone in plain sight takes some major balls, but it's incredibly fun when you do do it and they don't even notice. And thats part of what makes a thief so much fun to me- being able to steal from people without them even realizing it (at a major risk, of course). Now, however, if you steal anything from someone they're going to know it.

Thief steps out of the shadows.

If you're sitting at north square and you see that, check your inventory. Because if that thief is in your PK range chances are he just stole something. And now that thief is going to be lagged and vulnerable, so that's not even going to happen. More than likely all you're ever going to see from any thief from now on is this.

A sudden pain erupts in your skull.
You go to sleep.

That's about all the interaction you'll be getting from thieves, and it's going to get annoying. In my opinion this is definatly a step in the wrong direction for thieves. Their over-reliance on blackjack is tedious, makes thieves more bland, reduces the RP of the thief (instead of having a gold-loving halfling thief who can't keep his fingers out of peoples wallets, you have yet another thief who does nothing but aggresivly clobber people with blackjacks), and makes them annoying to anyone playing against a thief. Personally, I think they should be giving thieves more alternatives to blackjacks to make them a more varied and interesting class, not just blackjack machines.

[Addreodyn]

I agree with you divsky. The change takes away options on how to play your thief -- I can't say if it's more balanced, but it's definately less interesting.

I do like the changes to poison/plague though. Poison always just seemed like a weaker version of plague and was mainly used for defense against thieves and such. I always think things like this are silly, poison should be bad for you, not helpful.

[Burzuk]